Embodying change: Jewish women treading new pathways

Embodying change

Across the Jewish world, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen remarkable shifts in women’s access to religious authority and skilled ritual practice. Orthodox Jewish women watched with interest as their Reform and Conservative/Masorti counterparts achieved rabbinic ordination in 1972 and 1985, developments many assumed would mark the limits of change. Yet from the 1990s onward, Orthodox women also began receiving ordination—initially on an ad hoc basis and, since 2009, through emerging institutional frameworks.

At the same time, even in gender‑egalitarian movements where women could already serve as rabbis and cantors, it took another generation before communities began to imagine women fulfilling highly specialised ritual roles such as scribes and shochtot (slaughterers). Because such crafts depend on embodied, master‑apprentice learning, women faced distinctive barriers to gaining expertise: not only because they were women, but also because egalitarian commitments often separated them from traditional male teachers.

Rabbi Dr Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz & soferet Dr Jen Taylor Friedman trace these intertwined developments, exploring how women in both Orthodox and egalitarian contexts have negotiated access to training, authority, and mastery. Drawing on case studies—including the speakers’ lived experience—we will examine local variations, highlight the ingenuity of women who carved paths into traditionally male domains, and consider what these trajectories suggest for the future of Jewish religious leadership and practice.

About the Yerushah Lecture series

The annual Yerushah Lecture in the Faculty of Divinity was established with a benefaction from the Righteous Persons Foundation, created by Steven Spielberg from the proceeds of his 1993 film Schindler’s List. Yerushah is the Hebrew word for “heritage”. 

The Yerushah Lecture is devoted to Jewish heritage in all its aspects, with an emphasis on the transmission of Jewish identity and values across the generations. All are welcome to attend. Registration is not required.

About the speakers

Rabbi Dr Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz

Lindsey Taylor-Guthartz is a Teaching Associate at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She received her doctorate from University College London in 2016, and published her first book, Challenge and Conformity: The Religious Lives of Orthodox Jewish Women, with the Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in 2021. 

Her post-doc at the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Manchester, has laid the foundations for her second book, currently in progress, which will document the history and development of Limmud, the cross-communal Jewish conference founded in 1980.  She has lectured at the universities of Oxford, SOAS, King’s College London, and at Vassar College, New York, and has taught at the London School of Jewish Studies since 2005. 

In 2019 she founded the Pop-Up Beit Midrash, and in 2021 she received Orthodox rabbinic ordination from Yeshivat Maharat, New York. In 2023 she co-founded Azara, a new initiative opening up Jewish learning in the UK.

Soferet Dr Jen Taylor Friedman

Jen Taylor Friedman is a full-time Torah scribe and teacher of scribes, based in Cambridge. She is notable for having been the first known woman to write a Torah scroll for ritual use, and notorious for having put tefillin on a Barbie doll. 

Her doctorate, from the EPHE, is in the paleography of Torah scrolls, and she specialises in preserving the written culture of lost communities by using their scripts to write scrolls. As such, her eighth Torah scroll is based on an eighteenth-century Spanish-Portuguese script, and her ninth is projected to be in a style from late nineteenth-century Romania. 

Her work has featured in universities and museums in Europe, Israel, and North America. She founded and co-leads Stam Scribes, a collective of scribes from progressive denominations serving progressive communities. Her newest initiative involves writing Megillot Esther on giraffe skin.